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SOVIC Silvia, Thane Pat, Viazzo Pier Paolo (eds.), 2016, The History of Families and Households: Comparative European Dimensions, Leiden and Boston, Brill, 278 p.
The models developed by Hajnal and Laslett(1) to account for the various forms of European family structures over history have been much debated since they were presented in the 1960s and 70s. The studies in this book belong to that line of inquiry; the book bears the name of the June 2010 conference at London University's Institute of Historical Research where they were presented. Part I offers an overview of the "commonalities and diversities" between family structures in various geographic regions of Europe. Beatrice Moring investigates the notion of family, attempting to grasp family dynamics on the basis of indices other than those generally used - e.g. co-residence as apprehended by censuses. This enables her to examine the mutual economic assistance ability of families in different circumstances such as old age and widowhood. Violetta Hionidou analyses family organization on the Greek island of Kythera on the basis of eighteenth-century population censuses conducted by the Venitian administration and nineteenth-century censuses conducted under the British protectorate. She observes the effect of migration on households, the opposite of what is usually observed: here household composition was metamorphosized to enlarge the family by playing on age at marriage, for example, while preserving the principles of "equitable distribution among sons" that had always characterized family practices on the island.
The other two chapters of Part 1 concern Serbia. Mirjana Bobic, studies poll tax records to identify and reconstruct households in the region of Brankovic, under Ottoman rule, in 1455, while critically analyzing Laslett's categories and the difficulty of applying them to the case under study. Siegfried Gruber draws on...